- The Kings of Chess: A History of Chess Traced Through the Lives of Its Greatest Players (William Roland Hartston)
- Baroque Chess Openings, Or, How to Play Your Betters at Chess and on Occasion Win (Richard Wincor)
- The Middle Game in Chess (Reuben Fine)
- The Immortal Games of Capablanca (Fred Reinfeld)
- The Encyclopedia of Chess Openings
- Chess Life and Review Volumes 1 & 2
- The ABCs of Chess (Bruce Pandolfini)
- Tigran Petrosian: His life and games (Victor Vasiliev)
- Lasker's Manual of Chess (Emanuel Lasker)
- Handbuch des Schachspiels (Paul Rudolf von Bilguer)

Suciul
Intrigued by the title I looked this up and found the English translation due in March. What makes this such a good book then? It does look interesting, and at a 1,000 pages, massive.

I definitely want to read the translation asap - which ironically is not by the author who is American - since my French is so-so, though the book is easy to read.

The book sold tons of copies in Europe - in France they printed something like 10k first print, and within a week or so they needed 200k copies - and got all literary prizes (Goncourt, Academie) because it's truly fascinating, but it will all depend on how you take the narrator, one former SS/SD - the SD was the elite of the SS - Officer PhD. Maximilien Aue, sort of protegee of Himmler himself, intellectual, French educated since his mother was French, bisexual in a Nazi Germany where homosexuality was in practice punishable by death, currently living as an executive in France with his wife, twin children and writing his memoirs trying to justify what happened in the war.

And unrepentant to the end at least of war crimes, though his family and personal life is even more tortuous.

Only at the end the book unravels a little bit, but there are so many scenes that stay with you - without spoilers, there is one "philosophical" conversation with a Jewish young educated woman on the edge of the famous Kiev pit where the Nazi shot and buried tens of thousands, with Max sent by his CO to personally shoot some Jews because he got a reputation for squeamishness - Max was the officer in charge of records of a team that was exterminating Jews in Ukraine, but he avoided the killings himself and that would not do for his CO - there is another one with a Russian Commissar POW in Stalingrad, and then of course everything with his twin sister, with his mother and step father and the mysterious twin boys they adopted in occupied France, with his powerful protectors...

The pages turn by themselves and I am really curious how the book will be received in the English speaking world...

- War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
- Last Light of the Sun by Guy Kay
- Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
- The Kitchen God's Wife by Amy Tan
- Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden
- A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula LeGuin
- The Hobbit by JRR Tolkien
- Shogun by James Clavell
- Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
- Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen

If I really wanted to pick my very favourite fiction books the list would have to be about thirty books.

algernoninc, I almost listed Guy Kay's Sailing to Sarantium too, along with Lord of Emperors...those two books were just awesome. I never thought I would have found a scene about a chariot race exciting!

algernoninc, I almost listed Guy Kay's Sailing to Sarantium too, along with Lord of Emperors...those two books were just awesome. I never thought I would have found a scene about a chariot race exciting!

for me Sarantium is one book, split by the publishers for marketing reasons, that's why i only mention the first installment. It is my favorite Kay book for various personal reasons [I was already familiar with Ana Comnena and Robert Graves treatment of the same period, the question of artist integrity in a totalitarian regime, the low intensity magical elements], the rest of the top ten candidates are similarly selected for personal affinities, not objective literary value.
After Sarantium, I want more historical fantasy and this year i hope to include in my reading both Dorothy Dunnet "House of Niccolo" and Colleen McCullough "Masters of Rome".

I want more historical fantasy and this year i hope to include in my reading both Dorothy Dunnet "House of Niccolo" and Colleen McCullough "Masters of Rome".

Together with Mary Renault's Greek loose series of novels from Theseus to Alexander the above two are some of the best modern historical fiction longish series I've ever read, though they are quite different in styles and approaches.

Masters of Rome is almost encyclopedic, with a dry irony and cutting tone that may put some off, but the main characters that dominate the series from Lucius Cornelius and Gaius Marius to Caesar and Pompey and finally Octavian, Cleopatra and Antony (!) are just pitch perfect, so that this series makes my top 10 of all series/novels read

House of Niccolo is quite different in style and story, full of long range plans and plots, twists and turns that could be foreseen here and there and it reads in many ways like an epic fantasy series without magic/supernatural, but with everything else from mysterious orphans to exotic travels, fortune reversals... To some extent that took a little bit of my enjoyment for the series and it ranks just below the top series of all times for me, since while in an epic fantasy series like Kushiel (which leaving aside the sex, magic and religion has some similarities to House of Niccolo in style, plot, action) I have a lower threshold for my suspension of disbelief, in a historical epic my threshold for suspension of disbelief is much higher. Still House of Niccolo is a great series and I even got the 2 volume companion to it, since I liked it so much

Here is my list, although it is subject to change without warning.
These are in no particular order.

Little, Big by John CrowleyWinter Rose by Patricia McKillipThe City and the Stars by Arthur C. ClarkeA Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter MillerSomething Wicked This Way Comes by Ray BradburyThe Door Into Summer by Robert HeinleinFlowers for Algernon by Daniel KeyesThe Fifth Head of Cerberus by Gene WolfeLolita by Vladamir NabokovContact by Carl Sagan